Double evidential morphology in Turkish

Abstract

Turkish and Bulgarian both have “double evidential” constructions, which seem to contain reiterated evidential morphemes. This paper, focusing on Turkish data, shows that despite the morphological similarity between the indirect evidential -mIş and the “second” -mIş, double evidentials are not an instance of reduplication. Instead, I propose based on morphological evidence (separability of suffixes, morphological spell-out of related Turkic languages) and semantic evidence (the “second” -mIş introduces a new indexical, the Evaluator) that the second -mIş is the spell-out of a distinct syntactic head, which I call Dubitative.